SPECIAL ISSUE the Collapse of the Soviet Union
IntroductionKramer SPECIAL ISSUE The Collapse of the Soviet Union (Part 2) Introduction Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/5/4/3/700378/152039703322483747.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 ✣ The four articles in this special issue look at some of the major in- ternal and external factors that helped precipitate the breakup of the Soviet Union. These articles should be read in conjunction with the four that ap- peared in our ªrst special issue on the collapse of the USSR, published in Vol- ume 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003). Our ªnal special issue on this topic, to be pub- lished in Volume 6, No. 3 (Summer 2004), will deal with domestic political and economic trends that destabilized the Soviet regime and contributed to the demise of the Soviet state. The Social Context The ªrst article in the current issue, by Walter Connor, discusses the social context of the dramatic events in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. In the 1960s a number of Western scholars, inºuenced by the burgeoning lit- erature on “modernization,” argued that long-term changes in Soviet soci- ety—increased literacy and education levels, industrialization, increased ur- banization, greater occupational differentiation, generational change, the advent of modern communications, and other such trends—were mitigating the Soviet regime’s ability to exercise tight political and economic control.1 Al- 1. See, for example, the essays collected in Zbigniew Brzezinski, ed., Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Pol- itics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). A related theme is developed by Richard Lowenthal, “Development versus Utopia in Communist Policy,” in Chalmers Johnson, ed., Change in Communist Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp.
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